You can buy bread, but plenty of home bakersmake it themselvesanyway. You can buy cakes in the freezer aisle, but the demand for from-scratch recipes folks can make at home isn't nothing—just askRose Levy Beranbaum. Cookies, pies, cobblers: all well within the repertoire of many American home bakers.
Homemade crackers, though? They're the red-headed stepchild of this family. Overlooked. Forgotten. Meanwhile, they're almost devastatingly easy to make. And, not for nothing, they're delicious.
Let's talk about how easy. I gave my recipe for crackers to Epi's food director, Rhoda Boone, thinking that it could fall under our rubric of3-Ingredient Recipes. The recipe, which I learned in a restaurant where I used to work, is made with whole wheat flour, water, oil, salt, and a seed of one's choice to sprinkle on top, like fennel. There was a problem here, though. In 3-Ingredient Recipes, salt, oil, and water are gimmes; they don't even count. So this recipe fell short, rising only to the level of a 2-Ingredient Recipe. It wastoo basicto be a 3-Ingredient Recipe.
罗达建议加一点蜂蜜,一个明智的想法—it softens the flavors, rounds them out. And it brings the crackers into the community of respectable 3-Ingredient Recipes. Putting them together is a cinch, too. Place the flour and salt in a food processor and pulse it once or twice to mix. (Another thing this recipe does is celebrate whole wheat flour, which adds a wonderful sweetness here. If you can get some good, locally milled stuff, it'd be worth seeking out.) Combine water and a little olive oil—it lends tenderness—and, with the machine running, pour this mixture into the flour. In a couple of seconds it should come together in a ball around the blade of the processor. You've just made cracker dough.
All that's left now is to roll that dough out—pretty thin, around a quarter of an inch or less—and cut it with a pizza cutter into squares or diamonds. And to decide what kinds of seeds should go on top: fennel is great, sesame is more subtle, cumin is definitely not a terrible idea. I like to use a spray bottle filled with water to dampen the top of the dough before sprinkling the seeds on, because it helps them stick; alternately, use a pastry brush to brush a little water on them. Bake in a fairly hot oven about 20 minutes, until they're crisp.
And then? I guess it's time to go cheese shopping.
